


but if the story's over, why am i still writing pages?

by myillusionsgone



Series: said, "i'm fine," but it wasn't true [1]
Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Hanahaki Disease, Mentions of Blood, mentions of Gray Fullbuster, mentions of depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-21 11:42:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22560355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myillusionsgone/pseuds/myillusionsgone
Summary: Somewhere, a higher power is laughing, but she has never felt less like laughing along. — Ur
Relationships: Silver Fullbuster/Ur, Ur & Lyon Vastia
Series: said, "i'm fine," but it wasn't true [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1623238
Kudos: 7





	but if the story's over, why am i still writing pages?

They said that the Flower Curse had been divine punishment for humanity's hubris in the eyes of the god of love, eons ago. There were many legends regarding what had offended the god so much that he had cursed all of humankind before disappearing into oblivion, but all her life, Ur had never cared about the specifics. It was difficult to find — entertainment in the legend when in reality, the curse had claimed more than one life in her immediate family.

Compared to her uncle who had choked to death on tulips and her grandmother who had almost followed her son into a too-early grave after her husband's death, she had considered herself lucky. The only time she had coughed up flowers — _perfectly_ blue cornflowers — had been when she had been young, when she had loved and not known if her love would be answered in kind.

It had been, and a few weeks later, she had created a new spell, one that used cornflowers and she had laughed. Had laughed as she had wrapped an arm around Silver's shoulders and pressed a kiss against his neck. He had laughed with her as he had spun her around and the bloodied cornflowers had been forgotten as she had dragged him off to have dinner with her grandmother.

For only a moment, she had stopped and thought about those less fortunate than her, those who loved and loved until it killed them, and her heart had ached for them, compassion being both her vice and her virtue.

She had not laughed when she had hidden from the entire world in her bedroom because her daughter was dead and she was alone and everything hurt so much that she was close to wishing she could die like her uncle had, choking on petals. She had loved Ultear with her entire heart, had loved her like she had never loved anyone or anything before in her life. Her daughter had not been the answer to a prayer (Ur had never been the religious sort), but she had been an answer nevertheless, the answer to a question Ur had wanted to spend a lifetime asking over and over and over. But Ultear had been taken from the world, and everything had grown cold as if winter had come twice.

But the world insisted that she was not done yet, that there was still more she had to give and it sent her two students and demanded that she would make them strong, strong enough for them not to break under life's heavy weight. There had been a cruel sense of irony in this, one only she had seen — how the very thing that had broken her now demanded she would turn two boys that were already coming apart into something unbreakable.

But she had swallowed the grief that was clawing at her throat, demanding to be let out in a scream loud enough to startle the deaf gods, and she had gotten to work, had taught the boys how to draw strength from brittle ice. And she had loved them, not for being messengers that would carry her magic into the world one day but for themselves, for being just as lost as she was and for finding purpose amidst the emptiness.

That had been her, too, but it had been a long time since the days when she had put down her foot and demanded more than what had been given to her, when she had held her own fate in her hands and forged it into more than what it had been before, when she had taken her perfectly ordinary life and made it into more. In her hands, it had shattered, and so she tried to temper her students' curiosity, to teach them caution.

Lyon worried her most, his ambition matched only by his faith in her, and it was terrifying to think of what would happen when he would realise that she was not as great as he thought. She was scared for Gray too, not just because of his lofty goal but also because he did not have any other dreams. And they were so young, her students. Both of them should have other dreams, too; when she had had their age, she had wanted to travel the entire world — a thought that felt ridiculous now as she had never even left her little corner of Fiore.

A little, she allowed herself to dream. She could still leave, she did not have to stay in the house next to the empty grave. She could go somewhere else, she could cross the ocean and try to leave all the heartbreak she had suffered behind. Neither Ultear nor Silver would ever come back, and she should know better than to live her life waiting for the impossible. 

When she got sick, three months into teaching the boys, it meant the death of these thoughts.

The first time she coughed and there were blood and petals in her hand, Lyon almost caught her. He watched her like a hawk, always intent on learning more from her than she was willed to teach him just yet. She excused herself and stared at the petals and the blood as inside her ears, she could hear her own heartbeat thundering so loudly that she almost feared the boys could hear it too.

Violets. _Fucking violets_.

Of all the flowers that could be growing inside her lungs, it had to be violets. It could not be yellow roses or even dainty little cranberry flowers that made her think of the tea her grandmother used to make for her, the cure for heartache, no, it had to be violets. It had to be the goddamn symbol of faithfulness. Life was making another joke out of her, and once more, she was not laughing along.

No matter. She wiped off the blood, buried the petals in the trash and got back to work. There might not be hope for her — had Silver loved her, he would not have left her — but there was hope for her students. Time was of the essence, she reminded herself and instead of sulking over how Silver had promised her a life where she would die of old age, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she squared her shoulders and _got to work_.

Lyon, she feared, would never shake off his habit of casting with just one hand, no matter how many times she told him that it made the magic unstable, that it invited in mistakes that were evitable whereas Gray — she could not teach him the magic he craved most. And even if she could, she would not. Demon Slayer magic was, like all Slayer magic, inherently corrupted. Impure. Dangerous. It was something she would never touch and it was something she would never want her students to even hear about.

(Inexperienced as they were, they would think it the shortcut to their respective goals when really, it was a trap that had caught many before them.)

The day before it all ended (not that any of them knew it), Lyon caught her although something about the way he leaned against the door he had closed behind him inferred that he had known for a while already. He did not ask, only wrapped his arms around her waist and even as she was coming down from the worst cough, she gently patted his head.

He was the favourite she was not supposed to have, was the one she saw most of herself in, and this scared her so much more than the violets that sprouted in her lungs. She had always been unlucky, and this was the last thing she wanted Lyon, her first and most accomplished student, to be. 

It was what he **could** not be, truthfully. Lyon had such grand dreams that if he was even half as unlucky as she had often been, he would crash and burn — no magic she could teach would be able to prevent that. For this, she was sorry, so sorry. He was a sweet boy, once she had gotten used to his occasionally clumsy ways, and she wished that she could give him more on his way than magic and the advice she had never followed.

For the most part, she kept her distance from her students as she was their teacher, not their mother (see what it had gotten Ultear, her body too destroyed for a proper burial), but Lyon looked so sad and so she set aside bloodied tissues and hugged him tightly, only a soft sigh escaping her as there were things in live that could not be put into words. This — _their goodbye_ , in many ways — was one of them. He did not ask if she was dying, already knowing the answer even though he did not know the entire truth. She had been dying since Ultear had, even if the grief that had left no space for anything else had suppressed the curse festering in her lungs for a time.

The next day, she would walk towards Deliora — shoulders squared and flashing the creature a blood-stained grin — and she would not be afraid anymore because there were things between heaven and earth that made even the meekest of people brave, and Ur had never been meek.

(Lyon would plant violets on her grave, never telling Gray why.)


End file.
